Fed-EC: Bandwidth-Efficient Clustering-Based Federated Learning For Autonomous Visual Robot Navigation
Abstract
Centralized learning requires data to be aggregated at a central server, which poses significant challenges in terms of data privacy and bandwidth consumption. Federated learning presents a compelling alternative, however, vanilla federated learning methods deployed in robotics aim to learn a single global model across robots that works ideally for all. But in practice one model may not be well suited for robots deployed in various environments. This paper proposes Federated-EmbedCluster (Fed-EC), a clustering-based federated learning framework that is deployed with vision based autonomous robot navigation in diverse outdoor environments. The framework addresses the key federated learning challenge of deteriorating model performance of a single global model due to the presence of non-IID data across real-world robots. Extensive real-world experiments validate that Fed-EC reduces the communication size by 23x for each robot while matching the performance of centralized learning for goal-oriented navigation and outperforms local learning. Fed-EC can transfer previously learnt models to new robots that join the cluster.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2411.04112,
title = {Fed-EC: Bandwidth-Efficient Clustering-Based Federated Learning For Autonomous Visual Robot Navigation},
author = {Shreya Gummadi and Mateus V. Gasparino and Deepak Vasisht and Girish Chowdhary},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.04112},
year = {2025}
}